British journalist Iain Martin rightfully wants attention focused on the horrific things happening in Aleppo, one of Syria’s biggest cities. The city has been under siege for years, first by rebels, then by President Assad’s forces. The latter’s military is backed by Russia, which enables them to wreak tremendous havoc despite their obvious weakness.
We know how this ends. Even if the circumstances do not permit much on the ground reporting, messages from doctors and civilians revealing the horrors of the final assault by the Russian-backed Syrian regime are making it out of Aleppo. We know how this ends too, unfortunately, because of the work of historians who have written detailed accounts of the culmination of the fight for Stalingrad, of the travails of Warsaw and of Berlin’s fall. War of that level of intensity dulls and then obliterates the senses, until soldiers who would never consider behaving like animals in peacetime perpetrate horrors beyond imagining on the enemy they capture and on civilians unlucky enough to be caught in the middle.
That is happening right now, in Aleppo.
Although Assad and his Russian colleague Vladimir Putin are the main culprits, there’s someone else who’s to blame for this mess: President Obama.
Obama deserves a large share of the blame for the Aleppo disaster, because it is the end result of his approach to dealing with the Middle East and with Russia.
When he came to office, the Obama doctrine, you will remember, was termed “leading from behind” which meant not leading at all, or leading only a little in an unhurried take-a-chill-pill posture. It sounded kinda cool at the time, after the meltdown of Iraq, when foreign entanglements were out of fashion.
Sadly, however, this “leading from behind” policy didn’t quite work out as well as Obama and his fellow doves had hoped.
The weakness of Obama is actually best illustrated with reference to what happened in Britain, in relation to Syria. In August 2013, David Cameron, then Prime Minister, sought parliamentary approval for action. The vote was lost in the Commons when Ed Miliband, then Labour leader, led the opposition and 30 Tory MPs and nine Lib Dem MPs rebelled. On the night it seemed like the most shocking repudiation of Prime Ministerial authority, although Cameron’s calm acceptance of the vote meant the coalition government was barely dented.
Where the impact was biggest was in Washington, where President Obama took it as a cue to offer Congress an effective veto, although no vote was needed. The result was the scrapping of US plans for greater involvement aimed at preventing the Syrian regime using chemical weapons.
Russia and the Syrian regime rightfully consider Obama’s inaction a sign of his weakness as a global leader. They were all too happy to use that weakness to their own advantage. The result? A massive slaughter we haven’t seen before in this century. Aleppo is being destroyed — utterly and completely. Every single building in the city has been flattened by the Russian air force. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped in their homes, where they can do nothing else but wait for the inevitable death squads to murder them in cold blood.
There’s nothing left of the vibrant city that existed a mere few years ago. Streets are covered with the dead and the dying. Europe and the U.S. are calling on Assad and Putin to give civilians the opportunity to escape from the city, but those two ruthless leaders refuse to do so. Why would they? They can be sure Obama will not act against them anyway. He can complain and accuse them of crimes against humanity, but he lacks the courage to actually step in and act. And Assad and Putin know it, which is why they’re proceeding as before, blowing up civilians as they take the city back for the Syrian dictator.
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